The first piano arrived at around the age of six or seven and left a still-remaining gash in the garage to kitchen doorframe. A great deal, up to a certain point where lack of real or meaningful talent really came into play, came easily to me (moreso than my brother as I've already mentioned). And I, perhaps ahead of my time, was soon ready for public performance.
The first forrays were pretty disasterous - a piano solo that stopped twice in its tracks (even after back-to-back practice during the first half of the concert) and some accompaniment to the junior choir that barely got started.
This was all around the time of the dying-days of my time in Scouts which involved a crashingly awful performance from my "patrol" in the Christmas Gang Show that left me more-or-less weeping in the leaf-strewn car park, outside the scout hut, crying "why again?" to the moon! What a drama queen.
I don't think I showed the "classic" signs of stress when it came to performance. As ever, such things are internalised and hidden. My Mum and Dad were baffled by my distress at what I saw as crushing failure - although they might have been trying to make a small deal of it for my (or even their own) sake!
But I got better - before too long (in the grand scheme of things) I was the repetiteur of choice and, towards the end of my sixth form, performed the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 with some scraping from the school orchestra behind me (although D's oboe playing is still a pleasurable memory).
It was E's Mum who was the first to congratulate me that evening - my own parent's led with the "well - are you pleased?" line again - although they would be devastated, I'm sure, if they knew that I'd ever doubted their pride in that moment.
There is a large part of me that's tremendously pleased that I was encouraged to "keep it as a hobby" although I thought it was awfully defeatist at the time. It gave me great pleasure and focus - although I resisted, at times, being stretched too far - and it gave me goals which I managed, in the majority to fulfil. And at times it gave me a way to express myself where other forms of expression would have failed.
After a particularly violent ding-dong with my mother I sat down to do some piano practice and chose only slow, mediative and, I thought, calming pieces. I even played the fast pieces at a deliberately slow tempo, to maintain the mood that I thought I was creating. When my Dad got home, he asked my Mum what she'd been doing that afternoon.
"Listening to your son play the piano for me".
